banning me for what? i didn't say all his '80s films suck. some of them are pretty damn good, if flawed. big trouble is probably the best of the lot. but they do seem like a dropoff to me from assault/halloween which are unfuckwithable.

this is the weakest of the Carpenter/Russell troika but it is still great. Carpenter had an amazing 15 year run - Josh in Chicago otm about that. Even stuff like the Fog and They Live are loads of fun.

Ugh, I'm not sure I saw "Escape from LA" a second time after an advance preview I caught. Total bummer, and I'm not sure recycling some specific shots (and more than recycling the entire first film) counts as "symmetry" so much as laziness. All I really remember, though, is being distracted by the presence of the actress who used to be in "My So-Called Life."

ghosts of mars is spectaaaacularly bad. i mean like if carpenter hadn't done a BUNCH of schlock it would have to be a parody. highlight is when a character does a narrated flashback of all the scenes we just saw, to bring another character up to speed. "so then i went down the hallway..."

also when the one alien ghost is screaming on the hill like BAAGAAWUGGALAAAAAA, that was great. he sounds like Strong Mad.

Prince of Darkness is not boring! I'll watch that movie all day. Maybe it loses some steam in the overly-long opening sequence, maybe Jameson Parker has some offputting conversational gambits... Once they finally go to the church lock-in, it's great. Wish Dennis Dun had been in more movies.

Otoh, I saw that Vampires was on Amazon Prime streaming the other day and decided to give it a go. Made it 15 minutes in maybe? I just found myself second-guessing every single move any character made.

I love how boring Prince of Darkness is. I love that budget/or lack of narrative imagination determined that it's like the most apocalyptic scenario possible played out in the most modest of situations. Like, a handful of folks padding around an old church while the fate of the world teeters on the brink. Talk about the banality of evil.

Think I've watched this Escape from NY about 20x times (uk tip: catch repeats on itv4 often). Plot is hammy - sophistication isn't what I was expecting. That's fine.

Soundtrack is superb. Dean Stanton is the best of supporting cast; Pleasance follows close by. Disagree on Russell, I suppose you could mistake the lack of expression for a 'couldn't be bothered' but fits the Snake tough-street style. Only relative flaw is there wasn't enough of him and van Cleef. Would see a sequel where they were a team (as van Cleef was offering by the end). Instead we got Escape from LA.

Saw the last hour of this after coming back home last Fri - renewed my appreciation of the tape switch.

I remember being incredulous about Prince of Darkness until it got to the scene where Alice Cooper kills the nerd guy from Riptide with half a bicycle, then I realized it could do anything it wanted. it's like the pacing of the fight scene in They Live applied to an entire movie.

i wish i could conjure back up the particular way i was annoyed and bored by prince of darkness, cause i'm remembering these bits and pieces that were good. it just felt like this ridiculously large cast all pacing around independently of each other. like we're still meeting new people an hour into the movie, and nobody seems really aware of anything else that's going on. there's this sense of non-urgency or disconnectedness, people having weird my-dinner-with-andre conversations about the anti-god equation off in a separate movie from the people trying to escape the green slime. it would feel dreamlike if it felt like it was on purpose, i guess.

and then there's like a twenty-four hour montage, sun setting, sun rising, as dennis dun (IIRC) slowly tries to break through a wall with a chair or a spoon or something, and in the last ten minutes he tries to get the people on the other side to actually help? the creepy computer was cool i guess.

vampires is the carp nadir afaic. james woods is one of those guys who is exceptional in the right role and this wasn't one of them.

what I most remember abt that movie oddly is that is was one of gregory sierra's last screen roles before his apparent retirement. I love when old school dudes show up, but this was no 'deep cover' kinda role for him.